


Then I Imagine I'm Perfectly Safe

by scioscribe



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-06
Updated: 2014-06-06
Packaged: 2018-02-03 15:42:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,842
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1749905
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The lights at the end of Chilton’s hospital bed blinked in erratic constellations.  Will put his thumb over a green bulb and dimmed it.  He said, “This is not a good idea.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Then I Imagine I'm Perfectly Safe

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for all of season two, a slightly disorganized timeline, and some improbable decisions made the FBI.
> 
> I don't know why I think the world needs more stories about Chilton living at Will's, except it _totally does_. (Shout-out to Veni's "Collecting Strays," which is the first thing that made me ship it.)

The lights at the end of Chilton’s hospital bed blinked in erratic constellations. Will put his thumb over a green bulb and dimmed it. He said, “This is not a good idea.”

“It’s the only idea after Gideon,” Jack said. “If I could trust anyone else with it, I would.”

“My house is not a—a convalescent home for Hannibal Lecter’s victims.”

“Victims plural?”

Will took his thumb off the light. “I feel strange enough living here myself. And it may be a minor point to you, Jack, but I don’t _like_ Dr. Chilton.”

“An understandable point, but a petulant one. I doubt you not liking him will stop you from saving his life.”

Will thought of the ivy of antlers that sometimes grew in his head after he spoke with Hannibal and the way he could often barely make his way through the thicket of bone to the world outside their conversations. “I’m less than convinced of that.”

He stood there for an hour after Jack left, watching the lights in the vanilla-colored footboard of the portable bed, listening to Chilton breathe.

 

 

He got used to changing the gauze pads that sealed Chilton’s wound. It was a strange kind of intimacy to see the blood and the occasional sticky film of newly cohering skin. _Slough_ was the word the medical texts used. In all of their meetings together lately, Hannibal was talking to him about feeling like someone was offering their life to you like an olive branch and Will was thinking about field-dressing cuts of meat. He threw the stained pads away and replaced them; eased back Chilton’s dosage of sedative and painkiller. Chilton stirred slightly against the pillow. Autumn-colored hair disarrayed. It would be safer for him to be awake.

 

 

“I don’t know why I’m not in a hospital.”

“Gideon was in a hospital,” Will said.

“Gideon,” Chilton pointed out, with scrupulous accuracy, “was in my basement.”

“And Miriam Lass was in a well in a cabin in the middle of nowhere.”

“You have a cabin in the middle of nowhere,” Chilton said. He tucked his chin down to his chest. The last time Will had seen him awake and in this place was when Chilton had asked for help and Will had said yes and then said no. He needed to get Chilton to believe the yes this time or it wasn’t good for either of them but there was a low headache behind his eyes like a thundercloud and he didn’t know how hard he would be able to try.

“It’s a house, not a cabin,” Will said. “A cabin has logs.”

“Oh, well,” Chilton said, “then I imagine I’m perfectly safe,” and his eyes were like agate, catching the light, and Will almost laughed.

 

 

Chilton used measuring cups to feed the dogs. They were perplexed by this and licked his hands and the bottom of the cups so Chilton did dishes more often and when he wasn’t in the mood for it he used coffee mugs and Will imagined that in the mornings he could taste kibble and old steak behind the French roast and the two spoonfuls of sugar. It seemed like a symbol to him but he couldn’t deconstruct it and there was the strangeness of realizing that Hannibal would not have been able to either because there was something about the unpolished nature of their particular and peculiar type of domesticity that was in a language Hannibal could not read. He asked Chilton how much he was feeding the dogs and he wrote the answer down like that would solve something.

 

 

“I— _regret_ Gideon,” Chilton said one night. He was drinking whiskey and his gaze was slightly to Will’s left. “I put him in the way. There’s a limit to the amount of regret I can muster for the fate of a man who, well,” he gestured to his stomach, “but the fact remains that I looked for an answer and created disorganization instead. I put him in my own way, I suppose. One opened-up plaything and its toyed-with parts deserves another. Although,” he said, before Will could say anything, “there’s a brutality to the knife that I didn’t have. Also, and I don’t know that you believe me, but I genuinely thought at the time that he was the Chesapeake Ripper. It crossed my mind that it was—a heroic thing, to prove it.”

“It crossed your mind that it would make you famous.”

“Well,” Chilton said, his eyes on the curve of his glass. “Obviously.”

“I believe you,” Will said. “About thinking Gideon was the Ripper. In case you were wondering.”

“You believe I was stupid enough to believe that.”

“Take the compliment, doctor,” Will said. It occurred to him that an expressed belief that someone was telling the truth was not normally considered a compliment, but it seemed to him, still, that they had come a long way. He reached for the takeout menu and asked what Chilton thought about Thai.

 

 

Chilton hissed breath out through his teeth. “Did a man with fake dinosaur teeth just crash through your window and try to kill you?”

“I don’t think they’re dinosaur teeth,” Will said.

“I’m not picking up that glass,” Chilton said, and made the careful ascent upstairs again, his cane picking him up each step like he was a mountaineer, and Will remembered, briefly, that he had put Chilton upstairs to relish that little bit of discomfort and now he would have to admit to move him. Also, he still had blood on him. His head was full of disconcerting images. He was glad Chilton hadn’t attempted to talk to him about it, beyond the obvious.

 

 

A week later, he was dragging Freddie Lounds in, one hand around her arm and the other on her neck, flame-colored hair running wild between his fingers. He was yelling for Chilton, who came down the stairs, looking slightly too pale.

“I was hoping it would only be another dog,” he said. “Though this is better than last time.”

Freddie stilled beneath Will’s grip and he let her go. She separated herself from him and stood staring at Chilton. Finally, she nodded, as if she could guess the rest.

“You’ll have to be dead,” Will said to her.

Her skin was still the color of milk. She said, “Anyone would believe you’re a killer, Will, but no one in their right mind would believe you could kill me before I could kill you.”

“We’ll hope for your sake that no one else has that kind of high opinion of you.” He pointed up the stairs. “There’s another guest room to the left of Frederick’s.” He started to revise what he had said but then left it there.

 

 

They were both vegetarians. There was something strange about coming home to a house where there was no smell of meat cooking, only Frederick chopping carrots on the scratched wooden cutting board and Freddie Lounds folding enchiladas. They were both bad cooks. He didn’t know that he could have handled it if they hadn’t been.

 

 

He did not adjust to Freddie’s presence in his home the same way he had adjusted to Frederick’s. She was good with the dogs but there was something about her that was like a plucked string in his head and she was always dissonant. Frederick either liked her or liked having company when Will was gone because the two of them grew thick as thieves as the castaways washed up on Will’s shore. Will dragged Frederick out into the woods with him and made him go for walks. They stumbled through the snow, Frederick small in a big and puffed coat Will had bought secondhand.

“You don’t like her,” Frederick said.

“A very sophisticated deduction, _doctor_ ,” Will said. “Freddie is my moral opposite.”

“Not to poke holes in a perfectly _striking_ bit of self-aggrandizement,” Frederick said, “but wouldn’t _Hannibal_ be your moral opposite?”

Will didn’t even have to think about it. “No.” He bent down and gathered up snow in his hands. It was thin and powdery, like crumbled Styrofoam. “I think _you’re_ Hannibal’s moral opposite.” It was in the way Frederick’s showboating turned relentlessly out and out, as he looked for audience and approval, and the way Hannibal tightened everything down to one world and one set of eyes and valued Will for being able to see through his own, that they would be Achilles and Patroclus, one able to impersonate the other. If Frederick didn’t have people distinct from himself, the applause had no meaning. What was the sound of one hand clapping, after all?

Then, too, there was Frederick saying that he had regrets. That he had created disorganization.

But Frederick had his hands in his pockets and he was watching the birds with an intense glaze over his eyes that Will realized, gradually, was not just the sun. “I wish that were true, Will.”

 

 

The thing about empathy was that Will never said, or never could say, _but_. It was not: Frederick Chilton was a sneak and a spy and a terrible therapist and a shitty administrator, he was unethical and self-aggrandizing and self-deceptive and a jackass, _but_ … It had to be, by moral necessity, by _perceptive_ necessity, that Frederick was all those things _and_ was trying not to be. It had to be _and_ —the endless addition of a panoply of details.

 

 

So Frederick dozed off while _Adam’s Rib_ played against the scar tissue on his face and Freddie, who barely slept, was scrambling eggs and Will didn’t know why he was still downstairs except his head was a wilderness without any footprints and Hannibal was a compass driving him steadily south. Freddie was wearing Frederick’s shirt. Will didn’t ask because he suspected he was meant to. Instead, he got condensed milk and green peppers and helped her. Freddie said, “I thought at first that you hated him.”

“Hannibal?”

She shook her head.

“I don’t hate Frederick,” he said. He didn’t add the word _anymore_ because even at the time, even in the outdated stone fortress of Frederick Chilton’s shabbily-run institute that hired murderous orderlies and bugged its rooms, he did not have the energy or the focus. “I—resented him. The way you would a mosquito. And then I,” because he remembered covering and uncovering the light on the hospital bed with his hand, “remembered him with contempt.” He looked at Frederick. His eyes were still closed. This wouldn’t be what Will would want him to overhear. “That’s changed.”

“You still hate me,” Freddie said.

“Freddie,” he said, and for just a moment he felt absolutely and unequivocally himself, undivided, a house that would not fall, and almost fond of her, “you couldn’t stand it if I did anything else.”

She smiled and tilted the skillet over his plate. She said, “I’ll be glad to get out of your house.”

Freddie Lounds was lacquered surfaces and patterns; Will was matted dog hair and cotton. (Ordinarily. He had buying other things lately, to dress more and more like what he thought Hannibal wanted of him, and he had felt approval against his skin like silk.) What they had in common recently was mutual dislike, Frederick, and a fear that rankled their basic natures and stuck in their throats. They sat at the kitchen table eating eggs. The smooth surface of her mind was like a lake. The psychopath that had never killed anyone. Maybe she, he thought, was Hannibal’s real moral opposite. Will Graham’s house of the supposed dead was a distraction from his actual life.

 

 

Speaking of distractions: he barely blocked Margot from getting inside where Freddie and Frederick were playing Scrabble and bickering idly over the score and which of them was cheating more egregiously. Will and Margot conceived their ill-fated child in a motel off the interstate. Will drank from a dusty water glass with a heavy bottom. When he got home, Freddie said, “She’s in for a world of disappointment when it comes to you.”

That turned out to be true. When it did, Freddie got him drunk with a mechanical effectiveness and a purse full of mini-bar liquor bottles and said, “I’m sorry, Will,” with a sincerity in her marble-blue eyes that was truth even if it wasn’t sympathy. Frederick found a bottle of wine in the basement but it had turned to vinegar.

 

 

Frederick said, “How close are you?”

“Close,” Will said. He didn’t say that he had could almost taste it because Freddie and Frederick both had told him that discussions of food were off the table if he had just been with Hannibal. _Off the table_ , Will had repeated, and his smile had felt too tight, like an animal straining in a trap. He looked at his hands. “I’m afraid I’m blurring.”

Frederick touched him, tentatively, on the back of his knuckles. “I can testify, if need be, that you are, in fact, solid, and here.”

“You’re a lousy therapist, Frederick.”

“Well. You have terrible taste in health care providers.”

“But funny,” Will said. “I like funny.” He began to assemble, in his head, a time when this statement might possibly be true. Frederick squeezed his hands briefly and let him go. He thought about changing bandages and wondered when it had became Frederick who had to hold him together so he wouldn’t fly apart.

 

 

Freddie moved into an FBI safe-house. “I thought nothing was safe anymore,” Will said to Jack.

“This all has to end sometime,” Jack said. The look in his eyes said he was thinking of Bella. “Freddie Lounds insisted, but if you wanted, we could relocate Chilton, too. If things are getting hot, if Hannibal might come here, you might want distance—”

Distance was the last thing Will wanted. “It’s almost over,” he said. “Let it be over. He can stay.”

Jack was unreadable. The deeper he got into Hannibal, the less he understood Jack: moral opposites again. Everyone but him was distant from Hannibal and inverted from him but Will only traveled deeper and shed more skin.

Will said, “He’s a terrible cook,” and Jack nodded.

 

 

It was raining and Frederick was standing in front of the window, a shadow cut from a wash of gray, saying, “I suppose this isn’t worth my pointing it out, but you can’t go with him. You must know that.” Will held ties against his arm. Frederick swore softly in Spanish: the first of it Will had ever heard him speak. He would have laid odds before that Frederick didn’t know it.

“You _shouldn’t_ ,” Frederick said. A light revision, but meaningless. Will _shouldn’t_ have mutilated the body of a man he killed in self-defense, he _shouldn’t_ have set Beverly on Hannibal’s tail. _Should_ was not a word he had considered lately.

Frederick said, “Please don’t,” and that was different.

Will looked up.

He said, “I’m not—”

“Allow me,” Frederick said, “one occasion of being right. I have _watched_ you, Will, I’ve _seen_ —don’t. Don’t allow that vainglorious, cannibalistic _prick_ the pleasure of being right about you.”

“Vainglorious,” Will said, smirking at the word choice, but he almost did go anyway. It wasn’t the thought of Frederick that pulled him back from it but happenstance and Hannibal Lecter, but when he pressed his hand to his stomach and warm blood spread through the hollow of his palm, when he saw Abigail dying beside him, he thought _vainglory—vanity, all is vanity_ , and as the light faded out of his eyes, he felt his mouth trying to curve up at the edges, as if he could see through the pageantry of all Hannibal’s orchestrated tragedy and death to the hollowness and selfishness of it and he could understand it not as magnificent but empty, a vanity cake with its puff of air at the center, and he conceived of them all briefly as somehow funny, and Hannibal as somehow pitiful, that he would never see that he would not let himself be real.

 

 

Then he woke up and Abigail was dead and Will lost track of what pity he had managed to form. The grand, eagle-eye view of the dying was unfitted for his resurrected skull.

Jack and Alana were alive.

Hannibal was gone.

Frederick sat in the chair in Will’s hospital room and mostly didn’t talk.

 

 

What he had thought about Hannibal: outward elaboration, majesty, and substance cloaking something not grand but largely insubstantial. Something about Frederick as the opposite of that, he thought drowsily one night, as he hit the IV pump and it released softening chemicals into his bloodstream—something about the circumstantial carving away of pretension and bluster until—

As though Hannibal had been the sea with its dark coldness underneath, its tumultuousness, the way it ultimately ran out of his hands, and Frederick had, for all his faults, been an anchor. The necessary solidity to keep him from drifting away.

 

 

Frederick said something about moving out and shifted his weight slightly. Will said that they should wait and see, first, what happened.

He took some aspirin. He didn’t want to think about people leaving. And he didn’t want to define who he meant by people or what he meant by leaving because the first included Hannibal and the second included death. The state had paid for Abigail’s burial and Will had brought roses and fishing lures that looked out-of-place on the land.

Alana had gone to New York. Will had driven her to the airport. He’d held her hand briefly, lightly, in the parking lot and said, “I don’t suppose I could talk you into—”

“No,” she’d said, as firmly and kindly as she had ever said anything to him. She had never been imprecise, Alana Bloom. He thought she, of all of them, most deserved a clean break.

 

 

Freddie Lounds reappeared and asked for an interview.

“No,” Will said.

“No privileges as a former roommate? And here I heard Dr. Chilton gets to _stay_ , even.”

“Witness protection,” Will said.

“Then dinner.” And she brushed past him in her red-on-red-patterned coat and met Frederick in the kitchen where the two of them began to collaborate on a messily-made eggplant parmesan that Frederick burned and Freddie over-seasoned.

As she was leaving, Will said, “Are you lonely?”

“No.” She had always been a liar, but she was not, he suspected, fundamentally dishonest. “I could take company or leave it. But on a sliding scale from boring to interesting, well.” She touched his cheek lightly with gloved fingers. “I still prefer interesting. Don’t take it personally. I won’t be sorry when you leave.”

He didn’t ask how she knew. She had always known more about him than he’d been comfortable with.

 

 

Hannibal was captured in Madrid.

 _Abigail would have liked it_ , Will thought, and he had nightmares for three nights straight.

The trial lasted longer than that, and he and Frederick were both witnesses, as was Jack, as was Alana. Will asked if he could call her. She said she would prefer if he waited a few years. Jack brought Bella, who sat in the courtroom every day, her eyes like embers. She received Hannibal’s guilty verdict with tightened lips and clenched fists, joyful but wrathful, as if she could have meted out better punishment than prison. When Will closed his eyes, Abigail’s blood still unfurled on the floor like a dark velvet curtain. Hannibal’s hand on the back of his neck as he hugged him and Will’s blood warmed the space between them.

He felt emptied out. Not satisfied; not dissatisfied. Certainly not safe.

He met Hannibal’s eyes as if they had something to say to each other, still. He just didn’t know what. Hannibal’s hair was lighter from the sun. 

Frederick filled his basement with cement and sold his house. 

 

 

Will started to dream of fishing. Places without snow. The practical work of hands. He thought how comforting it would be to spend his days up to his elbows in something that would yield to comprehension.

 

 

“Louisiana,” Frederick said. “Oh.”

Will had two shirts left in his closet. He took out the blue one and began to fold it slowly. He thought about the smell of gasoline drifting inland from the coast as oil freighters hummed in the gulf.

Not long ago the conversation would have gone differently. He said, “I have enough money to live, if I live simply. I thought I’d fish.”

“You wouldn’t know how to live with complications,” Frederick said. It was meant to be a neutral assessment, but like a lot of Frederick’s analyses, it was fundamentally wrong: Will had learned how to live with very many complications.

Frederick got the last shirt out of the closet and folded it for him. His edges were crisp and professional. He said, “This is easier with cardboard.” His voice was tight.

Alana had jettisoned the grief she could not stand to carry. Jack had held onto it the way he had held onto everything else, with as rigid and unyielding a grip on justice as he had on his love for his wife. Jack had no trouble hating Hannibal. Where Alana could not hate, she had walked away. Alana would say: _keep him in your life, and he will be nothing but a memory of the worst days you’ll ever have_. Jack would say: _he’s arrogant and miscalculating and he’s damn lucky he’s not in prison himself. You already saved his life—you owe him nothing._

But Will was worn out with justice and reckonings. And he, too, was lucky enough to have merited whatever legal ignorance or divine forgiveness seemed to be available. And when he looked at Frederick, sometimes he didn’t think about Hannibal at all.

He had to live on the coast. Somewhere near an endless expanse of water. Somewhere near waves. Somewhere on the cusp of destruction.

But there had to be land. Whatever small spit of it he could find, whatever substance lay at the bottom of them, whatever skeleton of _normalcy_ there was to any of this.

Will said, “Tulane’s hiring. Its psychology department.”

He had fished already, and made a catch: Frederick’s mouth moved open and closed in a wide O. “You’d be in New Orleans?”

“I’d be close. But your life is here.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Frederick said shortly. His cheeks were pink. “Stay in the city where I’m recognizably a patsy for the area’s most notorious murderer? Not to mention you’re the only friend I have and until ten seconds ago, I was under the impression I would have to settle for _email_. It’s an embarrassing predicament. I’d rather New Orleans, if you don’t mind.”

“I don’t,” Will said. “But there might be days where I don’t want to see you.”

“You’re no barrel full of laughs and good cheer yourself, you know,” Frederick said. “Everything is always a doomsday scenario.” He took a picture frame off the dresser and put it in the suitcase, hugged by two layers of clothes. “There. That will travel well. You don’t want anything broken.”

“No,” Will said.


End file.
